Commentary by Mu Lu
The West’s rhetoric about China has entered a paranoid dead end. Whatever China does or says, the first thing the West will do is to question it.
China’s poverty alleviation efforts have lifted about 100 million people out of extreme poverty. This is strong evidence that by focusing on people-centered human rights principles, China has successfully established its own human rights development path that is in line with its own national conditions.
But with a sour grape mentality, the West refused to positively evaluate China’s achievements in poverty alleviation. Instead, it has been discrediting this historical achievement of human rights development China has made.
The BBC published on Sunday an article entitled “Has China lifted 100 million people out of poverty?” in the name of “Reality Check.” Although the article wrote at the end that “by any measure China has made huge strides to lift millions out of the toughest standards of living over the last few decades,” it meant nothing complimentary but raised doubts. In a similar tone, The New York Times published an article on December 31, 2020 to question the sustainability of China’s poverty alleviation efforts.
As we know, when China says it is a developing country, the West rebukes that China is a developed one. And after China announced its victory over extreme poverty reduction, the West narrow-mindedly described it as insubstantial propaganda. So unsurprisingly, the West’s distorted perception of China has been vividly reflected in the West’s biased rhetoric of China’s victory in poverty alleviation.
The BBC attributed the success in bringing a large number of people out of poverty to Chinese people’s hard work due to China’s economic reform “in favor of versions of capitalism.” This is completely a slander on the Communist Party of China (CPC), and a great insult to the diligent Chinese nation.
China’s victory in poverty alleviation is a miracle not only because of the huge number of people it has helped but also due to the difficulties encountered and huge sacrifices made in the process. In eight years, over three million civil servants have been deployed to remote places to fight poverty and at least 1,800 of them had sacrificed their lives by the end of 2020. This is unthinkable in the West. But the Western media has declined to mention such humanitarianism but focused on groundlessly accusing China.
‘The West isn’t happy about it’
John Copper, the Stanley J. Buckman Professor (emeritus) of International Studies at Rhodes College in Memphis, wrote in April 2019 that “China is best placed to tackle rural poverty globally, and the West isn’t happy about it.” Two years have passed, the West has become even unhappier. Their ineptitude in the COVID-19 fight has consumed their moral high ground of human rights to effectively stigmatize China.
Unable to find any reliable excuses to distort the reality of China’s victory in poverty alleviation, the malicious BBC cited the World Bank’s criterion in a bid to prove that China can achieve the victory because its definition of poverty is much lower than that of the World Bank. It even questioned, “While China has made substantial work of tackling the deepest poverty first, should it be holding itself to a higher standard?”
Such sophistry is absurd. It is just taking advantage of the World Bank’s authenticity to help the West smear China. But according to the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) in Beijing, if purchasing power parity and price difference between rural and urban areas in mainland China are considered, the standard we use is much higher than that of the World Bank.
Problems involving people’s livelihoods have become severer in the West, and the ravaging pandemic has made the so-called human rights myths in the West to be punctured one by one like bubbles. However, constantly distorting Western people’s perception of China cannot heal the West’s own diseases. Those with malicious intent have even been unable to find a decent excuse to discredit China. To stigmatize China for the sake of slander, the result will be that indisputable facts are increasingly acknowledged to the world.
– Minor edits and subheading by The Macau Post Daily
– Courtesy Global Times
